Postmortem (Part 1): Reflection + Thank you (Bonus Art) + Queer Games Bundle

I was writing a huge DevLog for "Faceless Date" when I realised it is becoming too long because it's actually multiple type of posts from different categories squeezed into one. It also gives me a bit of extra time to draw new art that are exclusively made for these special occasions. Therefore I'm splitting them into two parts:

• Part 1 (this one) is more of an actual reflection type of postmortem that includes a 'Thank You' art. 
• Part 2 talks about the design process, inspiration, some sketches, and unused content. I will take a little break before I continue on with writing the second part of the postmortem. It's because I'm very behind schedule with what I want to do with VN development, therefore this can wait a bit. Alternatively, you can follow me on itch or Twitter to get notified when I've released a new DevLog.

Reflections after a month:

The majority of this post was written before "Queer Games Bundle" was live, so it's mainly on the experience before that time. This post got delayed because I didn't finish the 'Thank You' art on time. Then I also remembered that the bundle was coming soon (time sure flies!), therefore I've decided to combine it as a promo piece for that.

If you've read my previous DevLog or followed me on Twitter, I wasn't doing that great after the release of "Faceless Date". Not to get into too much personal details, but I was going through a very frustrating and hectic time at my full-time job. I also had to miss the majority of the second half of the O2A2Q jam so it's extra pressure to finish the submission on time and then wait until I could get back to my personal computer to see what the reception of "Faceless Date" is like. Despite I've participated in multiple jams before, for the first time I was overwhelmed by the response from players. I had spent some time contemplating on how to word this feeling and whether I should, because there's that silent agreement that anyone who cannot face setbacks with stoicism is not cut out to be a content creator for a public audience.

More than a month has passed. In the end, I managed to play quite a lot of entries in O2A2Q and Blossom VN Jam. If you follow me, you'd see once in a while 5-star ratings drop by which are signs that I've finished an interesting VN. It's far less common that I will write reviews though, because I always overthink what I should say, and unfortunately I have less time to spare on that nowadays.

Right now, I wouldn't call it the full of optimism kind of 'good', but I'm feeling decent enough that I got the energy back of wanting to work on VNs and/or write DevLogs. It's different than when I almost wanted to abandon "Faceless Date" after its release and move on to a new future project to forget about it (not immediately of course, but I've got some projects planned further down the year). Regardless I always read all comments and respond to these, and particularly the extremely kind reviews have been reminders that it's unfair to those who enjoyed my little VN.

Sincerely, I want to thank everyone who has supported "Faceless Date" by playing the game, leaving a rating, a comment (you can see in the comment section who these awesome people are!), adding it to their collection, or retweeting my posts on Twitter. I'm also pleasantly surprised that this VN got featured in a stream play by DonDonPataPon who played multiple O2A2Q VN Jam games. Thank you all! 💖

Concerning itch algorithm and 4-star ratings:

What probably stressed me out the most is that the few early ratings for "Faceless Date" are 4-stars. Even though on paper 4-stars should be a high rating that should not be having any a 'downvoting' power compared to anything that has a 'bad' or 'meh' association like 1-3 stars. itch.io isn't transparent about its algorithm, but based on historical evidence with "Find My Mind" (my previous VN that also has non-perfect average rating) I deduced that they negatively affected that game's overall long-term health. I'm not implying that players should be giving 5-stars to everything, only that I suspect it might be better for a game to not receive a rating at all over getting 4-stars or lower. 

The algorithm tends to sink a game in the visibility list whenever the average rating is lower than another in the same list, and the total amount of ratings has to be in incredibly high numbers for the average rating to matter less. For example, I test a tag by looking at how much I need to scroll down a page to reach my game. Back then, I've always found it curious why "The Snowperson" (has perfect rating) is always placed so much higher than "Find My Mind" as it rarely gets views, let alone downloads for that VN, while "Find My Mind" has on average about 1 browser play a day and higher total amount views and plays. For reference, "The Snowperson" only had Windows, Mac, and Linux builds, while "Find My Mind" has browser build on top of these three at jam launch. It's only many months later that I've added browser and Android build for both of them. I'm talking about "Find My Mind" and "The Snowperson" but the very same ranking position difference can be currently observed between "Faceless Date" and "The Snowperson" as of current, when "Faceless Date" has most daily interactions and I assume it's because it's submitted to popular recent jams which players still visit.

When the launch boost inflation is over, the real popularity position is calculated. There's no guarantee that there will be a sufficient buffer to pull the average rating up again, or even worse it can also go even lower with more ratings being added. Yet for some reason I can't avoid looking at what rating has been given whenever the rating counter has gone up, even when they give me terrible anxiety. In general I don't want to miss out recognising who my biggest supporters are. If it's a rating from another dev, it helps me decide which game to play next.

Anyway, I don't know if there have been actually games that plummeted so much that all of its visibility has been killed off. As I'm a stubborn person, I've never actually seen the outcome of just leaving a game sit, because it automatically kicks off my instincts to double on the efforts to 'market' a game whenever I perceive it to be in some danger zone. You have no control over rating behaviour, but you can make attempts to bring in more views. You'd say it's pretty much a given that you're supposed to promoting your own work, but for a solo dev, low-key you rather want to be actually working on a project than talking about it. 😅 And there's also that barrier that it feels as if you brought up your game too many times or at the wrong places you'd wonder if people already got sick of it.

What I do after a game's launch:

• Tags swapping: I always swap around the tags multiple times to test what works. I definitely do this after the launch boost, because the popular tags are extremely competitive and if you don't have that lift it would be hard to find your game with that tag. It's always guesswork whether players commonly use that tag for filtering, so retrospectively I look at the referrals to see if a tag shows up when I monitor the performance of newer games.

• Specify platform: Not so much special action after launch, but an actual tip I see many devs omit it: pick the platform icon that corresponds to your build upload.
  • otherwise won't install with the itch app.
  • can be seen as a secret extra tag because many players do filter on platforms.

• DevLogs: To be frank, I have a little bit of a love/hate relationships with DevLogs. I've got an untested theory, but looking at my own numbers I hypothesise that they can give a boost tor your games even when people don't click to your game via the DevLog. That somehow the interactions to a DevLog get added to a hidden stat count in an unexplained way?
  • Anyway, the reason why I don't like them is because I have a verbosity curse and it takes me forever to finish even one post. On a serious note, it's the same ADHD symptoms that makes it challenging for me to wrap up (game) projects unless in special conditions like a jam deadline. My mind is everywhere at once which makes me space out a lot during a sentence, so I jump to a new sentence without completing the first, which results into fragmented incoherent text.
  • Besides, they give me an excuse to talk about my already launched projects without feeling repetitive, because I can put new previously unshared information in DevLogs and they're often in one lengthy post that are easy to ignore if you don't care about them. DevLogs can be released alongside game updates, so I made it a habit to add a DevLog to every update. These dry type of Release Notes posts are easy to write, so I mind these less. 😂

Introspection:

I recognise the pattern that I go overboard at allotting too much energy monitoring whether a VN launch goes well which is very tiring as I rather want to rest. Combined with that marketing efforts may only be effective as a small boon, or looking at it differently: there is a noticeable dip from lower average rating but perhaps it is not that big that it requires extra campaigns, because you spend more than what you get back. Nevertheless, it's not something that is easily said of 'next time I will not be looking at the graphs and avoid rehyping up my game again', I want to test some alternatives.

A month ago I seriously considered if I should turn off ratings so I will never be bothered by it. At some point it crosses the border that it depletes my enjoyment on doing game dev. But all games that have ratings turned off have no visibility at all, such as I see them always placed at the bottom on jam submissions page. If it didn't have such impact, I would have turned it off ages ago. My next game for O2A2 in July will be a "Fire Emblem Sacred Stones" fan VN that isn't even tailored for fans of that game. I'm tempted to turn off rating for this as an experiment to get a feeling if I enjoy this better, because this will be a low-key release and not something I treat as my main repertoire. So I will do it this way: if it's a VN I rushed to completion, then I will turn off ratings, but if I spent serious effort on it, I'll keep the rating option on.

I've always known where my priorities lie. I want to be a solo dev who creates games because I enjoy the tasks that are involved in the process, like sometimes you just want to code, write and draw a bit purely from a hobby perspective. I'm fully aware that they are anything but masterpieces, but it doesn't matter: they are made more for myself as a challenge. There is however still that selfish want that your game is also played by other people; I'd like to think that when you make something niche, surely there must be more people enjoying that same niche?

For me the sweet spot is to have some playerbase but not too large - too much attention makes me nervous. I would say this is already achieved. Such as you can reach a larger audience via Steam, but it's fine for me to stay on itch.io as I doubt I will ever make a commercial game. I know I've said that the reboot of "The Snowperson" might be potentially a paid game to cover its production costs (more accurately said: sometimes you buy game assets during a sale and then it dawns to you whether you're actually even going to use them), but let's be honest, that pitch is the hardest sells of all the projects I have. 😆

For this reason I also won't do any Download and Browser Plays milestone celebrations anymore. In the past I just followed along the trend where devs write these "Thank you for x amount of plays" posts, but they always felt a bit of uncharacteristic for me when I'm not aiming for high numbers. I don't mind revealing some general stats however:

• None of my games ("The Snowperson", "Find My Mind", "Faceless Date") have ever individually surpassed the 1000 marker during its entire lifetime but it's reached when I count them all together. 
• I have about 100 followers on itch.io and the same number on Twitter. I'm not a very active Twitter poster, I only tweet when I'm working on a jam project, when the game is released, and afterwards announce when updates and DevLogs are released. In the past it was more common for me to do long periods alternating between logging in and logging out to better concentrate on working, but nowadays I stick around on Twitter to see what other devs are doing.

In the end "Faceless Date" is doing healthily according to my standards. Let's hope I haven't jinxed its success right after I make this statement. Regardless if even this momentum can be kept up in the future, I'm really content that it has reached far more players than I expect it would ever be, especially when I felt very uncertain about it at the beginning.

Queer Games Bundle 2023:

The "Queer Games Bundle" recently went live and it will be open for the entire duration of Pride Month (June 1 - July 7, 2023). Support this bundle because the proceeds go directly to queer devs participating in it! While a lot of times, the $60 price point is brought up, but there is also a cheaper version where you can still get the same content if you can't afford the default price. As for me, I have opted out receiving funds from it.

https://itch.io/b/1812/queer-games-bundle-2023

Copied from its description:

If we had the budget of an AAA game, we could give every solo developer in this bundle a livable wage multiple times over for a year and every single team a massive funding boost. Imagine what the developers and artists in this bundle could create a year from now if they weren’t worried about starving or how to pay their rent this month. 

Purchasing the Queer Games Bundle is a direct action that you can take right now to support queer people in a life-changing way, and in exchange, you get over 450 amazing, heartfelt, fun, and radical games and artworks. 

Help nurture our diverse queer arts community, fund the creation of the next great game you love, and find your new favorite game by purchasing the bundle today.